Almost imperceptibly summer is creeping up on us. It seems that the village is already in early evening ‘sitting out’ mode, with the light evenings having arrived and the air also having begun to warm up. I’ve just been for a power walk around the perimeter of the village and found myself waving a hello to half the inhabitants, or so it seemed to me. Doing a power walk around our village is a pretty good way of getting about fifteen minutes of aerobic activity going on in the heart.

Leaving the house and going uphill towards Sofia’a hovel (for that’s what her home is, in all honesty), one climbs a one-in-three hill (as we used to call it in the old money) for about two hundred metres. Right outside of Sofia’s door the lane narrows to the point where no normal 4 wheeled vehicle could pass, although Dimitri on his quad bike often takes that route when going about his daily business of caring for his sheep, goats and various horafia that the family have dotted about the hillsides around the village. I’ve probably mentioned before that the street that goes up past our house was once steps, and was concreted over in order to facilitate motorised vehicles. I’d say though, that if you’re not driving a 4×4, and one with a low centre of gravity at that, you take your life in your hands trying to drive anything up further than our side gate, it’s that steep. When you think about how steep a street has to be in order to be comprised of steps in the first place, you get the idea of how steep it is now it’s concrete instead.

Anyway, as usual I digress. About a further fifty meters up from Sofia’s front door is the tiny village one up/one down of Christina and her ‘husband’ Gianni. Now here’s where it gets interesting. See, they’re in their sixties at the very least, and they’re not actually married. Giannis is the brother of the village ‘Mayor,’ our friend Angla’i’a, and she doesn’t have a good word to say about him. It’s her opinion that they’re claiming some kind of state benefits owing to the fact that they’re not man and wife, and that her brother is quite economical with the truth when it comes to what he tells the government about his situation health-wise. The net result of this intrigue is that Christina, who’s a sweet, long-suffering lady really, gets a raw deal from quite a few of the villagers owing to the fact that she’s living with Mr. Misery, Gianni, who I have to say we do find to be quite surly and not very loquacious. Let’s face it, he’s a grumpy old git to most people.

We were taking a walk up to what we call ‘Dingly Dell’ the other day and encountered Christina coming the other way along the steep dirt track that leads out of the village into the olive groves. Naturally, we stopped to pass the time of day with her and, for the first time, she kind of opened up to us a little. We have quite often exchanged a few friendly words while passing her house, but seldom more than that really. This time we talked for a while and she told us that she felt that the villagers were quite judgmental of her and that she didn’t always feel accepted. She isn’t from around these parts, but hails from somewhere near Athens. How she came to be shacked up with a Makryliot like Gianni isn’t all that clear, but here she is and here she stays. 

As we talked we asked about how she really was and she told us that she appreciated us and loved to see us. She felt we showed her love (we thought we were just being neighbourly) and always had smiles on our faces. She told us that she thought of us as good people, not inclined to judge her (we just thought we were being normal), and she was so glad that we’d come to live here. To be honest, we found ourselves warming to her all the more as we realised that we’d never actually seen her pass the time of day with anyone other than Sofia, who has dementia, and Christina goes down to her house most days to check that she’s all right. We finally said our goodbyes and ‘kali sinexeias’ and went on our respective ways, but not before Christina had promised to drop by the house some time. We continued climbing up the lane and agreed that there was quite a little “Peyton Place” going on, even in this small village of around 100 inhabitants, it seemed.

If you’re old enough to remember Peyton Place, then you’ll know that it was one of the very first ‘edgy’ soap operas ever to run and was set in small-town America, somewhere in Massachusetts, apparently. It was pretty racy for the era and ran for about five years in the late sixties. In fact the name “Peyton Place” has become synonymous with scandalous goings on, and people of a certain generation still use the expression today. Well, I just did, didn’t I? To get an idea of just how the series was pitched, it gets referred to in the rather clever Tom T. Hall song that was a massive hit for Jeannie C. Riley in 1968, “Harper Valley PTA.” 

Looking back over what I’ve written so far in this post, it is getting a bit long-winded isn’t it? Cutting to the chase then, the day after we’d had the chat with Christina in the lane, she turned up at the house with a couple of bags of goodies. There were cheese pies, spinach pies and some delicious biscuits that go really well with morning coffee, and she told us that everything she’d made herself. The pies were uncooked and frozen, so that they could go into the freezer and be dug out and cooked as required. She left promising to return the next day with yet more examples of her home cooking, and all this because we’d taken the time to stop and have a friendly natter with her.

We may not have much money, but we certainly see life, as my mum used to say.

Going back to the power walk around the village (after all, that was what started me off on all of this), when you get to the highest point you’ve really got a thumping heart if you’re ‘stepped it out’ because, passing the church, you then go along a level section for about fifty metres before starting the descent on the western side of the village. Walking down that lane I saw Poppi sitting in her glass-enclosed terrace and she gave me a wave. When you eventually get to the bottom you double-back on yourself following the ‘main road’ through the village, passing the kafeneio (where Adonis was just pulling up in his battered old Suzuki Vitara mini 4×4), the mailboxes and the homes of Manoli (he of the frequent falls and fractured hip), Angla’i’a and George, then back up the hill past Maria and Dimitri’s to our driveway. That last bit from the road up to the house is another heart pumper for about 70 metres too. 

Boy did I feel righteous by the time I got to our front door and eased off my trainers. This walk was done at around 6.30pm, and it seemed that the whole village was now into evening ‘sitting outside the door on a rickety old chair and keeping company for a while’ mode. This mode will last well into November now, signalling warmer air and light evenings, and it’s a great feeling, especially because all around the village there are blackbirds adding their exquisite tuneful songs to the bird chorus. I’ve mentioned this before too, I think, but something I learned about blackbirds many years ago, when I actually used to read up on native birds when we’d do our nature rambles in the UK, was that they begin to sing in late February and always stop by the end of August, often a week or two before. Thus, if you hear blackbirds singing, you know it’s the most ‘optimistic’ time of the year, if you get my meaning. The blackbirds here follow the same cycle as they do in the UK, and so the months when you will never hear one sing are September through January.

Time for this post’s batch of photos, quite a few of which were taken on a country walk we did a few days ago. If you look closely at the last one in this series of six, you’ll see just how much colour there is in the tiny wild flowers underfoot, and it can all easily be missed if you don’t take a moment to look closely enough…

This next one below I rather like, because it shows how the shade from the olive trees attracts that plant with the pretty yellow flowers whose stems taste of lemon (all the children pick and suck them) and they flourish better in that shade than in full sun. In some olive groves at this time of the year there are hundreds of these yellow patches, one around each tree trunk, and it looks lovely…

Last but not least, here’s a tiny ‘supermarket’ in a backstreet in the old town of Ierapetra taken Sunday April 2nd at around 11.00am. We liked the way the owner’s painted a lovely ‘general store’ scene on the canvas roller blind on the side…

•

And here’s the link to the new short story “Outage.”